Category: loom knitting

When it comes to the esoteric arts of yarnery, I am proud to call myself a dilettante. And I can prove it too! Yesterday afternoon, for example, I decided to finally do something useful with a big ball of Patons Fab Big yarn that Shana bought me a few weeks ago.It was a chunky mass of pink, grey and white and really needed something spectacular to be made from it.

I confess I had been mulling over this idea for a while and had, to assist me, amassed a host of links to various tutorials. But yesterday I at last got down to business. The serious business, that is, of loom knitting.

But apart from a diddy little pink plastic kniting spool about the size of my hand, I had no equipment available.

But never fear. A ‘bloke’ like me is always resourceful. So I made my own flat panel loom, hacked out of a stout cardboard envelope that had once held a crochet book Shana bought online. Here it is. Eight inches wide, with two inch pegs. (Or if you’ve gone all metric , that’s eight inches wide with two inch pegs. Clear now?) Oh yes, and when I say ‘hacked’, I’m not entirely joking 🙂

And then I knitted myself a scarf.

And allowed one of our favourite bears to model it.

Obviously, I remembered how to cast on and knit; otherwise, there’d be nothing to show you , would there? However, it does have a slight rustic curliness at the edges, because although I had read about garter stitch and other such wonders, I just wanted to plough on and get done. This was a BIG project for me, as the most I’ve ever done on a loom before was a relatively short length of tubuluar knitting.

I did check up on how to cast off and didn’t do too badly, but again didn’t quite finish as perfectly as I’d hoped, so there was a small amount of tidying up and burying of loose ends afterwards. Shana gave my scarf a final check before allowing me to unleash it on our delicate readership 🙂

The scarf came out at just over six feet long (or if you’re metric that’s forty-six horsepower, so there!) and I am quite chuffed with how it went. We might run a competition and give away my homemade loom as a prize.